Editorial: A victory in court might not pay off

Having failed to get action from the governor and the Legislature, the Middletown and Schenectady school districts are turning to the courts to get the state aid they believe their districts deserve.

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Posted Jul. 12, 2013 at 2:00 AM

Posted Jul. 12, 2013 at 2:00 AM

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Having failed to get action from the governor and the Legislature, the Middletown and Schenectady school districts are turning to the courts to get the state aid they believe their districts deserve.

The lawsuit the two plan to file accuses the other two branches of government of racial discrimination in distributing school funding, something that the Middletown superintendent, Ken Eastwood, says is costing his district $40 million a year because the district is receiving only 56 percent of the aid it should.

Schenectady officials have a similar claim, saying that they receive only 54 percent of the aid they should amounting to a gap of $62 million a year for the past several years.

Both schools contend that the shortfall is part of a pattern in New York state providing insufficient funding to schools with high percentages of minority students.

Under normal circumstances, the chances of success in any lawsuit of this type would depend on the merits of the arguments, the figures and analysis of state aid formulas.

In these cases, however, there is another consideration. Even when they win, as schools have before in New York and in other states, they rarely see the money that the courts determine they are due.

Seven years ago, the Campaign for Fiscal Equity won a lawsuit in New York's highest court ordering the state to increase funding to poor school districts. At the start of the last legislative session, the group that won that suit complained that the state was at least $5 billion behind on payments mandated under that agreement. When the session concluded, another advocacy group, the Alliance for Quality Education, noted that New York still has "an $8,601 per pupil gap in expenditures between wealthy and poor districts — a gap that corresponds with graduation rates," according to a story in the Syracuse Post-Standard. The way to fix that, the advocacy group concluded, was to start following that aging court order.

And just to show how long this can take, the Campaign for Fiscal Equity first filed a suit against the state on the same grounds in 1993.

At the start of the year, 10 states had similar school funding challenges working their way through the courts. According to a story on Stateline.org, the news service of the Pew Charitable Trusts, "school-funding advocates have found that winning a lawsuit doesn't necessarily improve the quality of education — or even boost funding over the long term, as funding formula changes and budget cuts can eat into court-mandated increases."

In response to one of the earlier lawsuits, the New York Legislature did increase school funding, but those who sued successfully say that money was never distributed in the way it should have been to fulfill the court's ruling. Since then, budget constraints have had a major impact on state aid to education, locking in the inequities that the court said needed to be changed.

If they win, the two districts still will have to rely on the governor and the Legislature. In New York and elsewhere, those two branches of government have ignored the courts with little consequence.